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Why I'm Unemployable

The good news is that being unemployable doesn’t mean you have to be unemployed.

1. I don’t fit in a box

I have never fit in, really. I have been a freelancer for 15 years. I have covered some unusual subjects in my career. I am six-foot-one. I grew up in Berkeley, California. In other parts of the country, the goal is to fit in. In Berkeley, the goal is to not fit in.

When I got downsized, I panicked. That panic led to wishful thinking. I started to believe that if I just got my resume right, if I just sent my resume to the right person, if I just said the right thing in an interview, I would get a real job, just like everyone else.

It’s seven months later, and that never happened.

2. If you are different, others may fail to recognize you

This is not to say I am unemployed. I am full-time self-employed. Given the economy, the unemployment rate, and the Great Recession, this is something of a miracle.

Currently, “the average worker who is unemployed has been searching for a job for 40.4 weeks.” If you have never been unemployed in a tough economy, you might think people who spend 40 weeks looking for a job are lazy. They are not. It’s hard out there for an unemployed person.

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As a lifelong freelancer I appreciate your essay. The most difficult period of my self-employment was after a dot-com startup I worked at for 3 years (my only staff position in 35 years) crashed and I had to renew my freelance network list.

Haydn Shaughnessy had a similar article recently (How to Stay Employed in the Jobless Economy). I’ve been engaging in a decent bit of discussion with him about the self-employed lifestyle, as I’ve had a similar career path to his and yours.

My question/problem is this- self-employment can be great in terms of freedom to work in multiple fields of interest and not having to fit into a corporate box. But what about health care?

This is a really important but under-examined issue in the freelancing economy. Freelancers are essentially shut out of the US health insurance market if they have any pre-existing conditions.

So freelancing is great as long as you’re healthy, but what do you do if you are struck with a chronic medical condition that requires regular visits to doctors?

Now the big-company career seems more attractive. But if your condition is severe enough, big business will not hire you due to your previous “outside the box” career path, and because you will not be able to put in the hours demanded by large corporations.

Now you are in the Catch-22 mode- you need a job that provides adequate health insurance to manage your medical condition, but no company offering adequate health insurance will hire you due to the limitations placed on you by the condition for which you need the health insurance.

I suspect that many young freelancers are in the “I’m indestructible” state of denial. They won’t feel that way when they enter their late 30s. And any children they might have will not at all be “indestructible”.

So let’s say you develop a heart murmur or catch Lyme’s Disease, and have a child with a common disease like asthma. How attractive is this business model at this point?

The other alternative is have a spouse with a big corp or government job, and hope that you don’t get divorced. And bear in mind that your new medical condition can provoke divorce.

Also, many US insurers consider pregnancy and/or having been pregnant a pre-existing condition.

This is not only an issue for the worker, but also for society.

Americans are continually encouraged to become entrepreneurs and innovators, whether in science and technology or the arts and literary fields. It is much easier to take the risk of starting your own business if you have health insurance. And it seems insane or cruel to attempt to voluntarily follow your entrepreneurial dreams if you are a parent.

Talk to a middle aged guy whose company just laid him off or went under or got bought by a foreign company and now he has no income, cobra for health insurance for a while anyway, and is back in the job search after years of corporate life.

It will be interesting to see if in the future freelance/telecommuting workers receive the same rights to health care benefits and retirement packages as full-time and part-time employees within corporations. With the way technology is headed, it will become an impossibility to deny such a basic need.

“The middleman is being cut out of the marketplace, consumers and creators are learning how to develop relationships that serve both sides better, and the big companies are failing to understand how to work right in the new economy.”

Remarkable to me how big companies have the capabilities, the budget, and the influence to reach the most people, but are not. And even when they do, it is often not done in a personal manner that makes every person feel special. I’d love to get your take on what composes of the ‘new economy’ maybe in a future blog post?

There’s a reason Wal-Mart was a big supporter of a universal single-payer system, and even backed new fees on employers to help support the system. One reason was that Wal-Mart smartly realized they could afford such fees, whereas forcing all companies to help support the system would probably put a lot of their competition out of business. But another and typically ignored point is that health care costs have become too much of a financial burden for employers already, but healthy workers and consumers is too important to just ignore coverage for people, so the corporate world is increasingly coming round to the idea that government and society need to find an easy, efficient, affordable way to shoulder the health care costs in order to alleviate the cost burden on companies. Even a small fee on employers will be cheaper, when the cost is spread around evenly and administered through the public sector, than making all companies continue supporting health care for their workers.

And when you factor in the growing amount of subcontracting and freelance labor in our workforce, the pressure to provide coverage is increasing, and there’s just no way employers are going to expand health care benefits to cover outsourced and freelance etc laborers. The only viable option is fast becoming a simple, true single payer system.

The last remaining obstacle is, of course, the insurance industries and private health care practitioners who fear that universal coverage/payment will force price/cost cuts and eat into profits, and who also sometimes fear that public health care coverage will eventually incorporate providers into the public sector as well.

But the simple truth of the matter is, insurance companies and private practitioners are outnumbered by the rest of the corporate world, and pretty soon there will be too much financial pressure and too many other special interests who overwhelm the influence of insurance and practitioner lobbying. Letting the general public simply opt to buy into Medicare and Medicaid (combined into a single system to oversee coverage), at a cheaper rate than typical insurance monthly costs, will be the most logical and cost-effective way to bring in added revenue (on top of a small fee on employers, which will be far less than companies are paying for employee insurance coverage now) and achieve universal coverage while maintaining private practitioners (although some costs will have to come down, particularly in the specialist fields).

Then, to get over the last hurdles, include a rule limiting lawsuits and capping malpractice insurance costs (which is all largely a red herring issue, to be frank, but it’s throwing a bone and fits within a system of universal coverage anyway, so a minor cap here goes a long way toward getting some opponents on board or at least out of the way).

Bingo, one of the biggest fears of the self-employed and unemployed/unemployable is alleviated. And really, this has to happen to avoid increased business costs — so it WILL happen, I am convinced.